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Thu, 15 Feb 2018 03:21:54 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/6a400e059bfbc516e41a6acd9b598a08?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngPlay, Happiness, Imagination, Learninghttps://philipminchin.com
Something to watch out for; or, Info-feudalism? Not on my watch; or, Tricknology 2.0https://philipminchin.com/2018/02/14/something-to-watch-out-for-or-info-feudalism-not-on-my-watch-or-tricknology-2-0/
https://philipminchin.com/2018/02/14/something-to-watch-out-for-or-info-feudalism-not-on-my-watch-or-tricknology-2-0/#respondWed, 14 Feb 2018 00:20:07 +0000http://philipminchin.com/?p=81443Continue reading →]]>Just over 10 years ago, as part of the Library 2.0 course (which I am ashamed to say I never finished; but I was mainly participating as support for less tech-savvy colleagues, and Library IT was even more understaffed then than it is now), I wrote a blog entry entitled Tricknology, in which I contended that technology inherently tips the scales towards falsehood.

My thinking was that, given that our approach to learning was evolved at a time when there was a pretty straightforward link between what we noticed and how it affected us, and therefore looks for repeated patterns, we are vulnerable to repeated false information – i.e. Hitler’s Big Lie, or Arendt’s argument from consistency.

Since technology is a tool for reproduction and transmission of information regardless of whether it’s true or false, and indeed IT is giving us the capacity to create false information which looks ever more plausible (up to and including computer-generated news footage, as I mentioned all those years ago), my argument was that technology, by dint of its purported neutrality, in fact serves to massively undermine the main advantage that truth has over lies: the relative difficulty of convincingly reproducing false experiences (the effort and cunning that goes into stage magic is an example).

Truth needs that advantage. If you don’t care about truth, you can play on all the cognitive weak spots of the human brain and create ideas and arguments that are near irresistible despite being demonstrable rubbish. We’ve seen that even in an age where evidence is hard to fake (indeed, corporations’ and politicians’ willingness to undermine notions of truth and evidence, and general standards of accountability, in order to negate inconvenient truths and the public’s willingness to listen to evidence has been a key driver in the development of the techniques now in play); how much more difficult is it going to be to resist manipulative crap when it has the ability to deceive not only our cognition but our empirical sensory processes as well?

We may be heading for an age of info-feudalism, where we are back to the Dark Ages in terms of having reliable empirical evidence of the wider world, and trust for such mediated information lies with hierarchical structures of authority (in the academic sense, i.e., the ability to make authoritative statements) that replicate the feudal system in form.

By this I mean there will be a roughly pyramidal system (or rather competing systems) of authority which delegates trust from to lesser bodies but reserves the right to overrule them, who in turn delegate to lesser authorities, etc. Individuals may pay particular credence to particular bodies within that arrangement, as a vassal might be more loyal to their local lord than to the king, but in the wider scheme of things the lord is dependent on the king. (The Catholic Church, with its various orders and lay movements which may be at loggerheads over questions of doctrine but which are all subject to papal edict and excommunication, offers an example of this.)

More egalitarian, mutual models are possible. For instance, entities such as Amnesty International, which has a demonstrable history of eschewing partisan politics and undertaking its own research, as well as member-elected oversight, already has tools for assessing the credibility of other bodies when considering partnerships and examining evidence for its reports. Such bodies may be willing to vouch for other organisations not as a function of control but as a way of incentivizing trustworthiness and expanding the sphere within which rational study, debate and decision are possible. Libraries should absolutely look to be part of these networks (provided of course that they are actually truthful organisations!) wherever possible.

Regardless of form, these structures may or may not bear and delegate decision-making authority as well. (Realistically, many will. Determining truth means determining the basis for action. But to my mind this is essentially eliding the press and the executive and is comparably dangerous to eliding the legislative and judicial functions.)

This all sounds like a nightmare to me too, but we live in an age of dawning nightmares, and what I’m describing here is not so far from the state of modern electoral politics and partisan media, so the library sector needs to think how it’s going to try to prevent such a scenario, and how to handle it if it arises.

The feudal library

I like to imagine libraries in such a world as something like abbeys for truth: communities of scholarship keeping the faith of free inquiry and quality information.

Realistically, like most actual historical abbeys, they will be constantly in tension with whichever other local powers hold sway; they will need some sort of external source of authority to keep such other powers off their back; and to the extent that they succeed in keeping to their mission, will be both an irritant and a tempting target to plunder. We will need to have each other’s backs and to have our community’s backs to the point where messing with us is clearly messing with them.

Regardless, here are the things that libraries dedicated to truth needs to be actively helping our communities to develop, something which we really should have been doing more of all along:

Info-literacy: helping people understand statements of scientific fact (how to comprehend the difference between generalisations and universal statements, probability, stats etc) and to distinguish them from hypotheses and theories, opinion, and articles of faith. Helping people understand the importance of controlling for bias in their experiments (double-blind techniques, etc.) and accounting for conflicts of interest and other motivating factors in reporting results, also including the fact that having a conflict of interest (especially one that’s openly declared) is not the same as being entirely unqualified to comment.

Critical thinking: techniques to spot elements of ideas and social structures that engineer compliance, complicity, complaisance. Stories of overcoming each.

Among other things, this will mean not exactly naming and debunking all cults, but stating plainly what the signs of cultic organisation are (social isolation from non-believers, extensive systems of monitoring and control, requiring surrender of individual autonomy at personal and economic levels, punishment for leaving, etc). This will make enemies; or more precisely, since these organisations were already enemies of free inquiry and freedom generally, will upset these pre-existing enemies.

Tech-awareness: what kinds of things can be faked? Which have demonstrably been faked? What are the signs that give fakes away? The role of privacy for preventing mass-manipulation and tools for creating/protecting privacy.

Psychological literacy: learning about cognitive bias and developing the skills to spot liars. (The game Werewolf is especially useful both for developing an instinct for deception and for demonstrating that it is possible to inch towards truth and the identification of liars in the absence of any certain knowledge.)

Self-awareness: as part of developing psychological literacy, making sure that people have direct experiences of their own cognitive bias, as one of the biggest cognitive biases we have is that we ourselves wouldn’t fall prey to the cognitive bias that afflicts everyone else. Games in general are incredibly powerful tools for this sort of education.

Undertaking and promulgating the study of power and corruption: there are patterns to how people become corrupted, and highlighting the danger points will either help people stay honest, or, if they fail to do so, stop them doing as much harm.

Human rights principles: in some ways, being fooled matters the most when it fulfills Voltaire’s dictum “any one who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices”. The surest antidote to that is to have unyielding boundaries to behaviour, such that whatever you believe, atrocities are never the result because they are simply not something you ever do. This was the wisdom of the survivors of World War 2 in 1948, and the principles have withstood the test of 70 years of malignment by despots of every stripe.

This means considering what we can do about the normalisation of torture in popular fiction. Everywhere I look – light-hearted crime drama (which in itself is a slightly weird phrase) like Castle, formerly highly ethical science fiction such as Star Trek, even superhero movies where the constraints of reality are entirely optional and the whole point is to be mythic and idealistic – torture is happening routinely at the hands of “good guys”, and routinely succeeding at getting the information needed. But torturedoesn’twork. And it’s least likely to work in the scenarios where it’s most commonly “justified” – the ticking timebomb, the missing child – precisely because the person being tortured knows that there will come a point where even if they give up the information it will be too late, and so the torture will have no reason to continue.
I realise that this is outside our traditional purview, but I consider this not only a question of protecting human rights norms, but of informational literacy.

Information theory principles for freedom: the need to not lie and to visibly identify and penalise lies and confirmed liars, but conversely the danger for such systems to be manipulated (to “love truth but forgive error”, to quote Voltaire again); default boundaries of acceptable inquiry into and judgment of others’ personal lives, so that the requirement to be honest doesn’t become overly intrusive and oppressive; techniques and fora for allowing unwelcome and apparently-incorrect opinions to be expressed in ways that give them the chance to either prove themselves or be debunked, without spilling over and having harmful effects in the wider world.

Systems thinking and game theory to see how individual instances that might merely be dodgy become horrific in bulk.

Modelling a rethought morality that includes the results of that thinking and places the proper significance on lies as informational coercion and injury of a severity related to the importance of the question at hand; inadvertent repetition of incorrect information as a form of possibly negligent accidental injury; and the technology of generating convincing false images as something that needs to be highly regulated and its practitioners given extensive ethical training.

Developing and demonstrating the importance of structures of authority (in the academic sense) that are non-hierarchical and as easy as possible to verify independently and locally. This means supporting citizen science, the development of local and democratically accessible facilities that support people to verify at least the basic principles of the sciences and to begin to understand the value of experimental techniques, including reproducibility, and so on.

Note that these things not only protect individuals, they also serve to increase the systemic resistance to the spread of lies. Every little bit of friction everywhere along the way helps.

The other thing is that libraries need to start thinking about these things now. They’re not far away, as Ovadya makes clear. We need to step up our efforts to be known as places that will help people find facts. This not only benefits us in the current world, it means that if the infocalypse comes, we are in a position to keep serving our community.

This will mean hiring more knowledgeable folks in a broader range of disciplines on staff. It will also mean beginning to take seriously the skills and knowledge we already have on staff, and treating them as things that we can account for and make visible and available to the community. It makes little sense to me that my colleague’s encyclopaedic knowledge of modern European royalty is only available to the public if someone happens to ask them or someone who knows of their interest.

Lastly, it also means advocating for explicit commitments to truthfulness and standards of evidence, and to institutions like ours that make those things accessible to the public, from our leaders. Someone (preferably many someones) has to be the custodian of this ideal; and as the institution whose mission is literally to bring these things into our communities, if not us, then who?

P.S. GLAM Blog Club readers might feel this is a bit of a cheaty way to hit the theme of “Watch”. But I honestly believe this is something to watch, and in fact that we are watching happen right now. Hopefully we can do more than just watch…

]]>https://philipminchin.com/2018/02/14/something-to-watch-out-for-or-info-feudalism-not-on-my-watch-or-tricknology-2-0/feed/0ftffgWeighed down by the dead hand of success: toxic parelthocracy in librarieshttps://philipminchin.com/2018/02/10/weighed-down-by-the-dead-hand-of-success-toxic-parelthocracy-in-libraries/
https://philipminchin.com/2018/02/10/weighed-down-by-the-dead-hand-of-success-toxic-parelthocracy-in-libraries/#commentsFri, 09 Feb 2018 22:35:42 +0000http://philipminchin.com/?p=81431Continue reading →]]>There is a creative company in Seattle that has been steadily publishing content for a single project for the past 25 years in around a dozen languages to a global community of tens of millions of people who not only engage with it individually but actively gather specifically to enjoy this work. The experiences it creates with its extraordinary mix of narrative, visual art, and design, are an ongoing process of discovery and exploration shared by a community as big as a medium-sized nation.

The company is Wizards of the Coast (WotC), and the endeavour is the original collectible card game, Magic: the Gathering. For the past 25 years, aside from a couple of hiccups, Magic has been growing steadily to its current considerable size. What’s more, the average length people stay engaged with the game is nine years – the typical game lasts one or two – and many play once or more a week, as opposed to the typical more sporadic play. In commercial terms, in terms of the dedication of its audience and the people-hours spent engaged with the work, in terms of its ongoing longevity and engagement with the public, and in artistic terms (or design terms if you have trouble with the idea of game design as art), Magic is one of the most successful creative works in history.

On the topic of success, Mark Rosewater, Magic’s Head Designer, has a saying he uses often when interacting with the players of his game: “Success breeds repetition.”

Most often he says this to explain the straightforward commercial mechanism that informs WotC’s design processes: if people like some element of a particular expansion, and therefore buy a lot of it, WotC’s designers tend to make more of that sort of thing.

But sometimes, especially when discussing game design, Rosewater uses his dictum in a more nuanced way. He is a big believer in consciously examining the structures around creative work and engineering them to prevent stagnation and creation-by-default. For example, he takes considerable care to ensure that he approaches every game expansion he designs from a different starting point to the previous sets he has made. This may be why he has been making Magic for 22 years straight, has made nearly 100 such projects in that time, and since he became Head Designer a decade and a half ago has presided over a long run of both quality design and audience growth.

When Rosewater says “success breeds repetition” in this context, it is a caution against success leading us to repeat things unthinkingly. Magic has been so successful for so long that it is easy even for a team of dedicated, highly-trained innovators to miss obvious and easy improvements. (For a somewhat involved example of an embarrassingly obvious fix to a nagging systemic problem that was missed for over a decade, see the extended endnote Solving the Small Set Problem.)

The key takeaway from Magic’s experience is this: it feels difficult to justify questioning your own assumptions when you are clearly doing well. First there is the initial trap of thinking that your success means there is no improvement to be made, or at least none necessary. Even if you avoid that, if your services are popular, it will always seem like a smarter move to devote all your resources to keeping on doing the thing everyone wants you to do, rather than taking time out to wonder whether you should still be doing it in exactly that way.

In other words, success breeds repetition even if repetition is undesirable and will get in the way of further success. The author or actor whose breakout hit leaves them reprising the same material over and over understands this only too well.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe libraries do, and I suspect that we may be on the road to learning it the hard way.

Parelthocracy in the library

Public libraries, and the library sector generally, are examples of the best and the worst tendencies of parelthocracy.

Benign parelthocracy: the library and the living past

On the one hand, the past is vitally important, and libraries’ commitment to giving their communities access to the past through their non-fiction and fiction collections is at the core of what it means to be civilized.

Without freely accessible evidence of where we have come from, both in the form of important historical works and in the form of new collections and interpretations of information about the past, both at the global or national level and at the local level, the public is ill-equipped to understand the present day and to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

And there is undeniably value in the inherent history of the library itself as an institution. In the same way that walking into a library connects us with all the other libraries throughout the world, there are connections to libraries and by extension human communities throughout time as well. (Pratchett’s L-space gave us a magical metaphor for this.)

The profound significance of all these things – the pragmatic, the symbolic, and the emotional – is a living example of the very best of bringing the past into the present. An institution without these things would be a book depository rather than a library.

Toxic parelthocracy in libraries

But in terms of decisionmaking, libraries (public libraries in particular, as that is where my personal knowledge is broadest, but I have seen these same tendencies across the sector) are prone to both palaeocracy and notocracy.

The problem is that we are so popular in our current configurations that we feel that that means we must be doing our job pretty well. In some respects that’s true; there’s no doubt that we add tremendous value to the communities we serve, with a recent study of libraries in Victoria finding that we give value to the community over 6 times greater than we cost to run. As the rest of government increasingly moves online, and libraries become one of the few places people can come for internet access and support in using computers, this number can only have gone up.

But let’s be real here, overly relying on public satisfaction figures is pre-emptively letting ourselves off the hook. We are:

pretty much the only place left dedicated to genuine sharing, where people can get cool, useful stuff for free, with nothing asked except to return physical items on time and still in shareable condition (and an increasing amount of free electronic stuff as well),

pretty much the only enclosed public space which is freely accessible to all and not dedicated to specific pre-programmed activities,

pretty much the only place with a mandate to help people navigate the world of information and culture, in a time when vital services are moving online and becoming more bureaucratic as a result of automation,

doing all the above in a framework of genuine, all-inclusive, secular public service.

In this context, getting 95%+ satisfaction ratings in customer surveys isn’t a definite sign of exceptional good work. All we can be sure it means is we aren’t visibly doing anything to anger significant numbers of our community enough to offset everything in the bullet points above.

But that’s not immediately apparent when we’re contrasted against other public infrastructure bodies, whose ratings are often far lower, because their work is designed to be taken for granted (e.g. rubbish collection) or is unwelcome to some part of its users (e.g. parking inspectors). Both the external bodies from whom we receive funding (and through them ultimately the public who take an interest in these things), and we ourselves, can be fooled into thinking we’re doing our job that much better than other public servants, and that there’s no pressing need to be critical of our own work.

In other words, because what we do is so important and makes us so well-loved, in some important respects we are failing to do our job at all.

This seems like a shocking statement when we work as hard as we do with the limited resources we have, but let me explain.

My understanding of the role of the library is that we enable free sharing of and self-directed access to culture and information, as well as a community space amenable to these sorts of pursuits. Our job is to know what’s out there, think critically about it, and offer our community tools, expert guidance, and assistance in engaging with it. A century ago, the best way to do this was to buy a bunch of books, store them in one place, sort and index them to make them easy to find, and provide knowledgeable staff to help people learn how to use our systems and access the information they needed, as well as provide useful context and guidance about further research.

As a community of so-called information management professionals, we have been shockingly complacent about our role in building the new information economies and ecologies, instead leaving that to engineers who all-too-often think that solving a technical problem such that the “good” numbers go up and the “bad” numbers go down is an ironclad guarantee that you’re actually making the world a better place (and that there are no thresholds that those numbers should never cross), and who are unambiguously building for profit and therefore power, rather than placing the public good above other considerations.

Libraries, with our commitment to universal humanistic ideals and our deep, rich, ancient knowledge of what constitutes a healthy community of truth-, beauty-, wellbeing- and joy-seekers, of weighing the rights of individuals against each other to maximise everyone’s freedom and wellbeing, could only have had a beneficial influence on the evolution of the internet. We could have… if we’d only rolled up our sleeves and mucked in, instead of sitting on the sidelines watching other people make the informational tools and processes that shape public discourse, grumbling to ourselves about their inadequacies, but nonetheless teaching people to use them with only token warning about their flaws and perils.

And that missed opportunity to make a difference matters. Given the prevalence of misinformation and divisive, inflated, disrespectful rhetoric, and their effects on the present state of the world, it is no exaggeration to say that if there had been just 1% more library in the internet from the early days, 1% more resistance to bullying and bulldust, global geopolitics would look radically different in 2018.

Not only that, but we are systemically biased against new models of funding, publishing and distribution that have sprung up. This sounds harsh, but how many libraries have systems in place to monitor these channels and acquire works through them, despite crowdfunding platforms supporting literally billions of dollars’ worth of creative and informational projects? How many of us do anything to help our patrons find the considerable volume of quality culture and information released under various free licenses, or to support the creators who are generous enough to freely share their work? We are even passing the buck on our responsibility to curate our own commerically-published collections to external suppliers, who take our funds and give us slush that doesn’t sell elsewhere, and then we act dismayed when it doesn’t get borrowed much either. Given the contrast between the ways we could be spending our collections budgets and the ways we actually do, it is not unreasonable to characterise the way many of us purchase collections as being a form of corporate welfare for publishing conglomerates.

Why is this? Are we lazy? Indifferent? Corrupt?

We are none of these things. I am proud to be part of a hardworking, passionate, principled profession. But, ironically for information management professionals, we are not looking at the big picture and thinking critically about what we measure and what questions we ask, and therefore what we could be doing to fulfil our timeless mission of empowering our communities by sharing and helping people navigate information and culture. As a result we are letting our passion for our communities and our immediate goals keep us working hard at tasks that only partly fulfil our mission – living by our principles, but not reflecting on them.

And that is not entirely our fault. As we’ve noted, our funds are consistently less than we need to meet existing demand. The funding bodies that give us money ask us to measure things that reflect those old ideas of what libraries are and do, and expect us to do more of those things but with the same or fewer resources. The public who love us do so for what we have already done and want us to do more of the same – and fair enough.

Success is breeding repetition.

The thing is, it’s hard to blame the funding bodies or the public for that.

The funding bodies see our overwhelmingly positive feedback from the public – why would they ask us to change things?

And the public are busy leading their own lives – they trust us to think about the worlds of information and culture. While of course we should be open to good ideas from anywhere, especially our communities, it isn’t for them, or the funding bodies, to imagine that we could be and steer our profession towards that.

We’re the professionals. It’s on us to resist the siren song of success and make sure we give ourselves room to not just repeat our achievements, but build on them.

And that’s where we’re failing.

Let’s look at the specifics of how, broken down into notocracy and palaeocracy.

Notocracy in the library

I’m starting with notocracy because, thankfully, notocracy among library staff themselves is relatively rare. Where it exists, it takes the form of active resistance to media other than books, regarding them as inferior or, more generously, “not a library thing”; and generally, the ”newer” the media to libaries, the greater the resistance. (By contrast, non-notocratic staff love books but are not hostile to other media per se.)

Literacy and books are absolutely core parts of the library mission, but to disparage other media rather than dispassionately recognise the strengths, weaknesses, and value of all media and help our communities engage accordingly is to live in denial of the full range of ways in which ideas and experiences can be expressed and shared. It’s hard to see how we can adequately discharge our duty to the public under those conditions.

Notocracy is more common among the ancillary industries who make their livings from libraries’ existing ways of doing things and are understandably reluctant to see competition for collections and library managament system (LMS) budgets. The vested interest there makes it not only easy but imperative to set aside their concerns: their job is to empower our work, not the other way around.

Palaeocracy in the library

As I hope the above makes clear, palaeocracy is the overwhelming majority of toxic parelthocracy in libraries.

It takes two forms: systemic palaeocracy, where our systems are designed in such a way as to leave little to no room for experimentation and innovation, especially of any substantive kind, and cultural palaeocracy, where the importance of the work we already do blinds us to the necessity of applying our core mission and principles to the culture as it currently exists, not as it was last century.

Both are driven by a sense of insufficient time and resources to do our jobs, and in some cases, particularly smaller rural library services, it’s hard to argue that.

But if your library service has a collections budget that is more than 10 times the wage of a single worker, and hundreds of linear metres of shelves which are regularly two-thirds full or more, you clearly have some wiggle room. And if you are routinely weeding large numbers of books that are still lendable in terms of both condition and currency (for example, a mint condition Windows 3.1 manual would not be current), either you have an incredibly neat and considerate community, or – I would argue – you are overspending on collections that your community isn’t using.

This is not a problem in and of itself (better a slight oversupply than an undersupply), but does suggest that you are underspending on other resources, staffing, and/or tools and programs to help your community make the most of the materials you do stock. Which in turn certainly means you are underspending on business intelligence, strategy development, and innovation.

Preventatives for palaeocracy

What does adequate spending on these things look like? Well, it involves actually having budget lines for them, for starters; I’m not sure many libraries do.

It requires looking for (and spending money getting) insights not only into the library trade but into the worlds of culture and information beyond. (It should not be so easy for a random solo punk like me to surprise heads of library services with facts about where and how the public are spending their cultural dollars, but in my consulting work I do – and not only when it comes to games.)

It means understanding that marketing is not just promotion. Marketing involves listening to the market and using that information to shape your offering as much as attempting to push your own product once it’s made. How many libraries spend much time monitoring their community on social media and sharing those insights with the staff body?

It means setting time and resources aside for staff to meet to share ideas, insights and tips more than a few hours of a highly structured and top-down-directed agenda every few months.

It certainly entails recognising and cultivating the staff who contribute ideas, looking into barriers that might prevent other staff from contributing too, and having a channel to meaningfully and visibly feed frontline staff ideas into decisionmaking and resource allocation conversations.

It means looking at examples like Google, which spends around 20% of its staff budget on innovation by giving staff one day a week to devise and work on their own personal ideas. That trust has given them Google Maps, Google Translate, Gmail and more. We’re never going to be able to match that share of our wages budget, but if nothing else, it highlights that an “innovation” budget that’s entirely predetermined by the same people who make the other budget decisions a year or more ahead of time is less effective than having some capacity to allow staff to follow interesting ideas as they arise.

It means understanding that only budgeting for innovation when you know ahead of time what the innovation is going to be is largely missing the point. Budgeting for innovation means being ready for opportunities and ideas when those ideas, and especially opportunities, arise – not a year and a half later after a budget submission and approval process. It also means being far more willing to make the case for varying budgets than libraries, public libraries at least, traditionally are.

It also requires that we recognise that part of our role is not just to offer things to the public but to tell the story of why they might matter. Underestimating the extent to which the public needs assistance to even recognise or understand your offerings, and how they might be useful to them, is a particular problem when it comes to new tech.

For example, I’ve heard complaints about 3D printers and makerspace tech generally being underutilised, but I’ve also seen library services whose communities make good use of them. Now, it is certainly true that there will be more interest in some communities than others, but there is always, always a strong correlation between uptake and the energy and visibility with which the devices have been promoted to the community. Maker tech is potentially relevant to DIYers, kids, STEM students, design students, designers, artists, crafters, tchotchke-makers, random tinkerers… the list goes on. But most people are still only dimly aware of them, and have no idea of the kinds of uses they can have. To judge the relevance of entirely new tech – and 3D printers are very new, and transformative in all kinds of ways – without first taking the time to ensure you’ve given the public plenty of opportunity to grok it is a highly palaeocratic move.

(And don’t even get me started on “online safety” classes. Fiddling with your Facebook privacy settings is a sick joke if you’re not first having a serious conversation about Facebook itself, and the hidden empires of profiling algorithms that chitter and scurry behind its façade – and much of the rest of the web as well.)

The wisdom of risk

But of course, what I’m arguing for here is devoting time and resources to things we don’t know will work, when there are so many things we know do work. It’s understandable to want to stick with the old reliables – doing anything else feels like a gamble.

Here I’m going to back to Magic Head Designer Mark Rosewater again. This may seem of dubious relevance, but hear me out: Magic, as I said in the introduction, is a game of discovery and exploration; and libraries are places of discovery and exploration.

From time to time, the Magic team make a misstep and put out a card that turns out to be so unexpectedly powerful in some way that it needs to be banned or restricted in tournament play. Rosewater always acknowledges the specific mistake, of course, but makes the point that if this never happened he would be more worried – because it would indicate that they were being too conservative in their card designs. Or as he puts it, “Never taking any risks is the biggest risk of all.”

In other words, human fallibility being what it is, Rosewater recognises that to achieve exceptional things you need to accept that failure is possible. Look to prevent it, and to minimise it where prevention fails, by all means, and to learn from it when it happens so that you don’t make the same mistake twice, but accept it as the inevitable price of the excellence and innovation that you are striving for.

Are lessons from a game design company applicable to a public institution like a library? Are we supposed to be as driven to innovate?

Well, I’m not actually arguing that we should be as driven to innovate, but I think the burden of proof is on those who argue that at least some of that drive shouldn’t be systemically built into what we do.

We know that the world is rapidly changing, especially in the spheres of information and culture, and the demands and opportunities it creates for our communities are changing with it. Our mission is to help our communities engage with the world’s information and culture. Given these two facts, we have two alternatives: either we expand the things we do, to ensure our mission keeps pace with those wider changes; or we curtail our mission so that it is only about doing the specific things we already do.

I am not inclined to agree that our mission is worth limiting in that way.

And given that, we have a clear need to foster innovation, not only to respond to the ceaseless stream of invention and creation in the wider world but in order to proactively promote the core library values of democratic inclusion; truth and wisdom; free inquiry and exploration; and beauty, fun, and joy.

If we were building a library for the first time now, without any baggage of historical assumptions, but with an eye to the needs of our community now and into the future, what would it look like? That’s the question we need to answer; and the answer is what we need to strive towards.

To understand this example, you need to know two things about Magic: the Gathering.

Magic is often played in a draft format, where the players take turns choosing cards from the same pool. In the most common draft format, each player is given three packs of cards which they open, draft a card they want to use in their deck, and then pass the remainder around. This pattern continues – draft a card, pass the pack on – until the pack is all drafted, at which point the next pack is opened. Once all three packs are drafted, each player takes the cards they drafted and builds a deck, with which they then compete in a tournament.

Magic releases new sets of cards regularly, and from about the third year of the game, these sets were made in “blocks”, groups of three sets in a kind of trilogy. The first, large set in the block provided baseline effects, established the gameplay themes and the narrative premise and setting, and was followed by a couple of smaller expansions that continued the narrative and evolved the mechanics of play.

For around the first 15 years of Magic, or more precisely of drafting and the block structure, drafting used to follow the same pattern as the block: start with one or two packs of the large set, then move on to one pack of each the small sets which evolved from the first. (So AAA when only the large set had been released, then AAB when the first small set was released, then ABC when the whole block was out.)

But WotC had a problem with the small sets: despite by their nature being interesting evolutions on the themes of the first set, they didn’t feel like they had enough impact on the draft, which made them feel less exciting to a sizeable contingent of players, which in turn reduced their sales and meant that, while the world in which the block was often well-known and -loved, players often had no idea of how the second and third parts of the blocks’ stories turned out.

It took over a decade before anyone suggested the simple expedient of opening the cards from the newest set first and allowing those to set the agenda for subsequent drafting. Exactly the same mix of packs, just change the order (from AAB to BAA or ABC to CBA), and all of a sudden the small sets are impacting the draft much more effectively.

Since breaking free of the old default, they have gone on to change the numbers of each set in the drafting mix (BAA became BBA), to change the default composition of blocks (1 large set, 2 small became 1 large, 1 small), and finally to do away with “blocks” altogether and just design large sets for each quarterly release. Escaping the grip of that legacy decision not only fixed the problem they could see, the “small set problem”, but freed them up to experiment and innovate to something that works far better.

Now, this is a company full of literal geniuses. The game was created by a professor of mathematics who went on to design many more smash hit games and to write a pioneering textbook about the history and design of games, and other designers have included accomplished writers, artists, biologists, ecologists, and an actual-no-jokes rocket scientist.

And yet although the problem I’ve described was clear in retrospect (though bear in mind that the simple fact of me having to explain the problem in a way that is comprehensible to readers with no knowledge of the game serves to make it even more readily apparent here than it was at the time), a solution that simple eluded them for years. Why?

Well, part of the problem was that – as we’ve seen – success breeds repetition.

At the time they made the change, Magic was a tabletop game with an international audience in the high millions. It has since grown into the tens of millions, which gives you an idea of both its growth trajectory at that moment and the success of these changes. The sets weren’t performing as well as WotC would have liked, but they weren’t exactly failing. And it’s not illogical to think that if you want something to succeed more, you just do more of the thing that’s making it succeed, namely design it as well as you can.

(The term for this particular trap is “local maximum”. The phenomenon is analogous to trying to climb the highest mountain in the world by always going upwards from wherever you are right now. Unless you’re lucky enough to actually be at the base of the mountain, and have a straight upward path to the top, at some point you will be at the top of a hill and be unable to go higher.)

And when you’re thinking about the sales outcomes of a particular set, the default is to look at the properties of the set itself. Magic’s designers were smart enough to also consider their small sets in the context of the design of the whole block, and even of the blocks either side, so they were already thinking more strategically than usual.

The other key part of the problem was that thinking about the draft order wasn’t really anybody particular’s job. It was the designers’ more than anyone else, but they had a whole slew of much bigger and more clearly defined responsibilities – namely, designing all the cards that would be printed – to tight deadlines every quarter… and then, as the popularity of the game grew and they started making more products, more frequently still.

So even at a company rightly famed for innovation and creativity, a combination of success and poorly-structured distributions of work can produce “innovation dead zones” – areas of work where defaults go unquestioned and cause systemic problems for years. Frankly, all things considered, I think it’s to WotC’s credit that they spotted the problem as soon as they did – though I have wondered if a helpful fan or two might have helped prompt the change (one of the benefits of having, and listening to, such a large community – the old open-source truism Linus’s Law, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”).

What are your institution’s blind spots? And to whom are you willing to listen to find them?

]]>https://philipminchin.com/2018/02/10/weighed-down-by-the-dead-hand-of-success-toxic-parelthocracy-in-libraries/feed/2ftffgOne dead hand, and one living: examining the past’s grip on the presenthttps://philipminchin.com/2018/02/09/one-dead-hand-and-one-living-examining-the-pasts-grip-on-the-present/
https://philipminchin.com/2018/02/09/one-dead-hand-and-one-living-examining-the-pasts-grip-on-the-present/#respondFri, 09 Feb 2018 05:27:03 +0000http://philipminchin.com/?p=81428Continue reading →]]>Empirical evidence of success has its limits as a way of selecting leaders, decision-makers, and philosophical frameworks.

Don’t get me wrong, a meritocratic review of past performance is far superior to claims of divine mandate, brute coercion, and/or the ability to weave appealing ideas and rhetoric without any grounding in reality.

But the problem is this: a track record of success is necessarily evidence of success under past conditions and past definitions of success. If those conditions have changed – or if our knowledge of those conditions and what constitutes success has deepened, possibly as a result of observing the effects of those past “successes” – what counted as success in the past may have no bearing on success in the future, or indeed may even indicate a predisposition to failure under the new circumstances.

In its neutral form, I call the tendency to make determinations based on influence (including but not limited to evidence) from the past parelthocracy, rule of the past. And as a historian and human rights advocate, I will gladly affirm that there are good reasons to attend to the lessons of the past! Fetishizing the new, and ignoring/trivializing/falsifying history, is, ironically, an age-old mistake.

However, there are two related terms which are less benign, for when parelthocracy turns inert or resentful:

palaeocracy (rule of the ancient) is the fossilized persistence of ideas past the point where they clearly no longer apply; and

notocracy (rule of the back, as in turning one’s back) where power is used to attempt to prolong or recreate past conditions for the sake of doing so rather than because of any objective good – or, just as often, create the conditions of an imagined or delusory past.

Palaeocracy

Consider the colossal carnage in WWI trench warfare, where generals who rose through the ranks due to successes in cavalry warfare collided with the realities of mechanised industrial death-dealing. This constituted palaeocracy, where outdated ideas simply happened to be prevalent among those in charge and to persist in the face of evidence.

Other factors, especially classism, nationalism, and vested economic interests, also played major roles in the butchery and bungling, of course. But the generals on both sides were not only misgoverning from our historical perspective, but failing on their own jingoistic terms, because they were simply unable to comprehend that, for all their extensive training and experience, their understanding of war was almost totally redundant.

Two key ingredients of this example of palaeocracy, and a common though by no means universal element of palaeocracy in general, were operational distance – the fact that those making decisions were rarely anywhere near the implementation of those decisions – and a hierarchy designed to centralise information and decision-making authority. These two things meant that the generals could go literally years without the fact of their own redundancy being apparent to them, ignorant of the reality their troops faced, and often not even asking the right questions about their strategic situation. In this light, the astonishing victim-blaming of their troops and the lower echelons of the hierarchy as inferior, inadequate, cowardly, excessively sentimental, treasonous, and so on, becomes both more understandable (though still completely unforgivable) and a clear symptom of palaeocratic bungling.

Notocracy

As an example of notocracy, see the ability of oil and coal fortunes to buy delay in otherwise self-evidently desirable changes to energy policy. These billionaires and corporations accumulated tremendous wealth and political influence by (along with the usual shenanigans) being exceptional providers of energy under old, less-informed understandings of the world. It isn’t their fault that those understandings predated the invention of more distributed, cheaper, egalitarian, secure, and sustainable forms of energy generation, and unwittingly ignored the climate-destabilising effects of mass fossil fuel use.

What is their fault is the way they are now using the power thus accumulated to intentionally obfuscate climate science (see Doubt is their product) and the scientific and popular mandate to change; and more importantly, to ensure governments continue to subsidise and support their outdated technology, while at the same time withholding from the newer, cleaner, fairer tech the same economy-shifting levels of support that underwrote and continues to underwrite the success of fossil fuels.[1]

This is not simply an inability to adapt mental models to new information. It is a wilful, aggressive attempt to preserve outdated arrangements in the face of abundant evidence that this benefits nobody but the owners of the fossil fuel industry – and ultimately, not even them. Hence, notocracy rather than palaeocracy.

As this example suggests, the extra effort involved in notocracy means that its advocates are highly motivated, both in their reasoning and in acting on that reasoning. That motivation is often financial or political, but can be purely emotional, based on the same psychological drives as nostalgia.[2]

Notocracy is not the same as resistance to change where change is (a) avoidable and (b) for the worse. A worker resisting the erosion of their wages and working conditions is not doing so out of notocracy, unless there genuinely is no other way to keep the business running and there are no other businesses present or likely to arise where the worker can find a job. The chief executive who fails to cut their salary and bonus packages before asking workers to take a cut in pay and conditions is driven by notocracy, and also a sense of entitlement (the two often go hand in hand).

A final key point about notocracy is that the “past” is not necessarily the actual historical past. In fact, I would argue that this kind of obsessive devotion to a past way of doing things, outside of overwhelming personal vested interest such as the fossil fuel example above, is quite often the result of a partial and selective, or even outright false, understanding of the past, often as mythologised through particular partisan lenses.

The qualities of parelthocracy

Both of these toxic modes of parelthocracy are almost always accompanied by denial and/or wilful blindness about the aspects of the past that were undesirable, or historically contingent and no longer applicable. (In some cases, the “past” for which palaeocrats and notocrats yearn never actually existed![3]) Active efforts to conceal, ignore, destroy evidence of, or shout down contradictory facts are more prominent in notocracy (palaeocracy tends to rely on incumbency to get away with just shutting its eyes to inconvenient truth) but can occur in either. Likewise, messengers can get shot in organisations or communities suffering either mode, but in palaeocracy this will usually take the form of social penalties such as labelling the person a troublemaker, overly ambitious, or otherwise too big for their britches, whereas a notocratic reaction is more aggressively punitive.

Parelthocracy (and its more malign subtypes) is of course a trait of any real endeavour; science itself is prone to these tendencies. Not only in the sense that “science advances one funeral at a time” – that’s not science per se but the social context around science. Rather, because science involves an incremental gathering of empirical data, those data need to be recognised as historically situated rather than somehow being magically representative of eternal truth.

A live contemporary example is the way machine-learning AI algorithms draw bigoted conclusions from empirical data… data which was of course generated by societies with centuries-long legacies of bigoted systems heavily impacting social outcomes, and gathered by fallible human scientists influenced by the unconscious assumptions of those bigoted systems.

However, as attested by the fact that these discussions exist relatively early in the development of machine learning, science is much better equipped – and far more predisposed – to identify and overcome these same tendencies than most other human institutions.

The dangers of palaeocracy and notocracy also exist at smaller, more local levels. Palaeocracy is more common, as lower stakes mean less likelihood of corrupt self-interest, but notocracy is driven as much by emotion as greed, so both can be found.

“Seniority” in employment and management tends to mean not only experience but also a tendency to devalue new ideas, especially those from junior staff, and new cultural forms. To the managers in question, this feels like sensible conservatism, the “wisdom of experience”, but from the outside – especially in service organisations where the decision-making is not technical – can objectively result in inferior outcomes.

A concrete example that I have personally verified follows. A staff member of a local not-for-profit institution became aware of a regional brainstorming call for ideas that related to one of their areas of interest and expertise. The staff member had an idea that was both relevant and practicable enough to at least discuss, but the process for submitting the idea required that it be submitted by someone more senior. The staff member in question passed on the idea to their manager, only to be told after the deadline for submission had passed that the manager had decided not to contributeanything at all to the call for ideas (thereby impoverishing the brainstorming process), rather than submit an idea that the manager “did not understand”. No attempt to contact the staff member for clarification had been made, and other people to whom the staff member showed the idea found it perfectly comprehensible and worth discussing.

In confirming this story, I also established that the manager in question is widely regarded as hard-working, talented, intelligent and collegial, and was legitimately very busy in that time. This incident is not intended by me or the person who reported it to me as a personal criticism of that manager. But clearly there were other options than simply doing nothing, such as:

trusting their staff member enough to submit the idea as-was;

delegating the work of clarifying and submitting the idea;

submitting the idea with an appropriate caveat;

or recognising the value of the kind of initiative the staff member was showing, and shuffling priorities for the few minutes necessary to clarify whatever had confused the manager.

The final irony is that the idea was a simple, elegant framework for fostering and supporting innovation.

This example shows that palaeocracy need not be the result of an explicit commitment to old assumptions and ideas. It can simply be the result of institutional pressures squeezing out the time required to evaluate and develop new ideas. Indeed, the non-profit and government sectors are particularly and increasingly prone to these pressures, thanks to relentless funding cuts and “efficiency” drives that characterise efficiency as “doing more of the same for less” – a definition which embodies palaeocracy in no uncertain terms.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

Avoiding toxic parelthocracy

The past is indubitably important in understanding and making the most of the present. Engaged awareness of our history and the causal systems within which we operate is the living hand of the past, a strong guiding and supportive force.

But the past can also lay heavy on us, a dead weight holding us back and dragging us down.

My hope is that by naming and briefly describing palaeocracy and notocracy I have given managers and planners tools to avoid or at least minimise these tendencies. I have not named healthy parelthocracy because it is simply part of wisdom.

(And technically it is not a “-cracy”. Where our relationship to the past is healthy, even the strongest traditions are viewed in terms of the value they offer to the living people who embody them, and are not treated as ruling impulses to be honoured at all costs. The ancestors who bequeathed us these traditions, assuming they did so out of love for their descendants, would not want them to be harmful.)

The key takeaway is that we need to redefine assumptions around leadership and power to better reflect this principle that past success is not always a guarantor of suitability for future success.

In particular, we need to build into our systems for making decisions and assigning responsibilities a repeated check-in about whether the environment (or our understanding thereof) has substantially changed, or for that matter whether the people involved have substantially changed in ways that affect their suitability for the role. If we find that there have been major changes in our operating context, we should probably expect to need similar changes, perhaps even radical ones, not only in our operations but in our decision-making processes.

We need to rethink our attitudes to leadership and past decisions, to recognise that the decision and/or leader that were selected in the past may have been perfectly correct at the time (or at least as correct as was humanly possible in the context) but may not be the best choices now – without this being in any way a negative reflection on anyone involved. (After all, in some cases it will be the exact same qualities that made a choice the correct one in the past that make it now incorrect!) Loss aversion makes the shift to a world where leadership is not a ladder to climb but a temporary mantle bestowed for particular purposes psychologically difficult to adjust to; but once it is established as a norm it will serve substantially better than current hierarchical modes of advancement.

But beyond specific choices and individuals, we particularly need to apply these principles to systemic frameworks such as budgets, procedures, and hierarchies. Humans have a natural capacity and even tendency to adapt to change, though not always consciously, and certainly with a countervailing conservatism. But the whole point of such official structures is to be a fixed reference point; metrics are compared to previous years’, procedures are designed to produce consistent outcomes and can go years without change, and even budgets, which are produced annually, tend to be templated on the previous year’s. Changing these frameworks requires actual effort, which in and of itself is a cost, even before we start considering implementing the concrete changes these bureaucratic changes reflect.

Of these three areas of change, the most important is probably the shift away from fixed hierarchies towards more flexible and inclusive decision-making processes. Giving a meaningful voice in the discussion to more people, especially to those closest to the actual interface between budgets/procedures/frameworks and the real world, makes it far more likely that outdated ideas will be confronted with relevant new facts. Other necessary changes will flow from this.

As a significant and closely related side benefit, it also fosters inclusion of a broader range of demographic voices in the decision-making process. This is self-evidently true on simple numerical grounds – where there’s room for more voices, you get a wider range of them. But just as crucially, the nature of privilege is such that dominant groups will be over-represented in decision-making positions, and subordinate groups will be concentrated at the operational, “lower” levels.

But all three aspects of systemic frameworks need to be examined, and in some ways the more so the more successful an institution has been in the past. My post tomorrow will discuss the parelthocratic perils of success, with particular reference to libraries.

.

[1] That they have the gall to fund think-tanks which purport to advocate a “free market” is especially insulting; if they are serious about a “level playing field”, they should either insist on their competitors and their competitors’ customers receiving the same subsidies as them and theirs, or reject all government subsidy and repay everything they have received to date, indexed to inflation if not at market interest rates throughout the period.

[2] In fact, I originally called notocracy nostocracy instead – but recent psychological research indicates that nostalgia can be a useful coping mechanism, and by definition this sort of denialism is unhealthy.

[3] One need only look at the quite recent idea that videogames are a masculine pastime. I am old enough to remember a time in my childhood when my sisters and I happily played PC games made by women without anyone thinking this was weird (well, not the gender aspects; the pastime itself was sometimes viewed as a bit strange, and I heard a few comments that it was unusual to see siblings collaborating as we did to beat the games). Yet some elements of the community have taken it upon themselves to treat women on the scene as interlopers. This is a clear case of false notocracy which has been consciously socially engineered by marketeers, and then further engineered and weaponised by outside forces – some of whom had previously been openly, viciously contemptuous of games and gamers – as part of a broader culture war.

]]>https://philipminchin.com/2018/02/09/one-dead-hand-and-one-living-examining-the-pasts-grip-on-the-present/feed/0ftffgMonopolyhttps://philipminchin.com/2016/06/15/monopoly/
https://philipminchin.com/2016/06/15/monopoly/#respondWed, 15 Jun 2016 05:56:14 +0000http://philipminchin.com/?p=81374Continue reading →]]>As someone who advocates for tabletop games in libraries, I often have to talk about Monopoly. It’s one of the best-known and best-selling board games in the world, but (while I can get it at a discount for libraries if they want it) I don’t include it in my bundle of games, and I don’t recommend libraries spend their limited games budgets on it, except if they are planning on pursuing more advanced active games criticism activities. Why is this?

The answer is bound up in some really interesting broader questions about games and libraries, and also some of the more fascinating aspects of the history of Monopoly and of board games more generally.

Libraries – just for books?

Libraries exist to make the world of human thought, culture and information accessible and discoverable to our communities. This is why most libraries now include not only books but music, television, movies and videogames in their collections, and why we increasingly offer access to creative technologies as well.

In pursuing this mission, there is often a tension between quality and popularity: between giving our community what they know they want, and ensuring that they have access to the kind of high-quality material that our professional experience and judgment indicates they are likely to need as they develop their knowledge of and engagement with the wider world. In other words, to give them the intellectual room and resources to stretch their developing tastes and capacities.

To some librarians, those other collections – movies, music, and so on – are only bought at all because they fall under that “popular” rubric. However, most librarians now acknowledge that a picture of our culture that ignored media other than books would be woefully incomplete; while books are still a major focus, we do try to offer some sort of collection of other media according to the same mix of popularity and quality. So movie collections will include Casablanca, Citizen Kane and maybe some Kurosawa; popular music collections will include the Beatles; and so on.

When it comes to tabletop games, though, we generally just throw some dollars at a staff member and send them off to a nearby department store to buy with an eye to value. This has the same results for quality that would result for our book collections if that was how we did book-buying. We wouldn’t consider a small bundle of mass-market paperbacks of mixed age, some reprinted multiple times, an adequate collection – but that’s what we usually end up with in the tabletop game department. (One library service I know of recently opened an incredible new central library with the latest consoles and maker tech, and all the most up-to-date equipment you could want. Its board game collection? Scrabble, Twister – which seems to have been swiftly removed from public display – Monopoly… and Avengers Monopoly.)

The irony is that if there’s any single medium that most benefits from the kind of showcasing of excellence that libraries do, it’s games.

Games and the network effect

All creative works are subject to some sort of network effect – the more other people know about a work, the more likely it is that any given individual will hear about it and decide to take a look. But with tabletop games, this effect is magnified by two key facts: (a) that games are more easily learned in play than self-taught from instructions, making it more daunting to pick up a game cold than a book; and (b) they need other people to play with – so popularity affects not only recommendations and retail availability, but ability to engage with the work at all.

This means that the normal bias towards novelty is counterbalanced by conservative pressures that keep people playing games that are already widely known. In this context, libraries’ roles as discoverers and curators of excellence becomes even more important.

But surely this only matters if the most widely-known games are also not good games?

Yes. Well. Let me ask you: do you seriously believe that in the past 100 years, there have been no advances in the art of game design? That nothing has been learned about human nature and psychology, or the nature of fun? (And fun, again, is not trivial but the active aspect of joy.)

In fact, all these things have been rich veins of discovery, and games have been the single greatest area of cultural innovation in the 20th and 21st Centuries. This is true even setting aside the obvious originality of videogames, possible at all only thanks to recent technological advances. In the past 70-50 years, tabletop games alone have given us several major new subdisciplines, some of which were spawned during the modelling of existential threats such as nuclear war and ecological catastrophe, and others of which (roleplaying games, story games) are closely linked to libraries’ undisputed interests: narrative and literacy.

So obviously games will have improved in the past 100 years. But aren’t the classics classics for a reason? Mightn’t some old games be worth having too?

Some, yes. Chess unquestionably belongs in a library, for instance. But looking at Monopoly from any angle other than popularity or historical interest isn’t especially favourable.

A note to the reader: no disrespect intended

Before I continue, let me be 100% clear about one thing: I’m not saying that it can’t be fun to play Monopoly, or that those who find it enjoyable are wrong or bad people. If you enjoy it, good for you! I’m saying that what fun there is comes from the players themselves rather than the design of the game; it reflects well on your playgroup that you can enjoy it. And perhaps, if you were to try games that are actually better designed to produce fun, you might enjoy yourselves even more.

Certainly the evidence is that this is the case; international board games website boardgamegeek.com allows users (a diverse global crowd whose primary shared characteristic is to have played a wide range of games; BGG is the tabletop games equivalent of goodreads) to rank games on a few different scales. On its overall ranking, which at the time I checked (6 June 2016) contained 12,288 games with enough ratings to be able to sort them into a ranked order, Monopoly was #12,280 – the 9th-worst game of all of them. This isn’t just hobbyist snobbery; in its family game ranking, which contained 1481 family games, Monopoly was #1480. Clearly, people who have played with any kind of “breadth” (in the same way one might “read broadly”) think poorly of Monopoly.

Monopoly is bad, and that’s for a reason

Monopoly is widely known, but it’s as legendary for spawning bitter family fights and for dragging on interminably even though it’s obvious who’s going to win as it is for being widely played.

It’s also notorious among tabletop enthusiasts for making some people loathe the entire medium of board games; pretty much any tabletop game aficionado has at some time had to convince a potential player that actually, most board games are nothing like Monopoly in order to get them to even consider playing a board game.

The structure of the game is such that players lucky enough – and it is hugely dependent on luck – to secure an early advantage almost invariably find that it snowballs into more of the same. The only thing that offsets that early luck, other than extreme good luck later in the game, is the ability to persuade, manipulate or bully others into making the deals you want.

And this isn’t a coincidence.

The myth of Monopoly is that it was created during the Depression by an out-of-work salesman named Clarence Darrow. The truth is that the game Darrow sold Parker Brothers was stolen: it was invented in 1904 as The Landlord’s Game by a feminist and social campaigner named Lizzie Magie, as an educational tool to demonstrate why capitalism’s concentration of wealth is a bad idea. Her original game had an additional set of rules that produced a more balanced, sustainable outcome, modelled on her Georgist economic principles, designed to be played in contrast to the capitalistic rules of the game we all know, and to produce a steady increase in wealth for all players.[1]

Take a moment to absorb two points. First, far from being trivial, games were being used to deliver serious (though not necessarily correct) systemic arguments on pressing social questions over 100 years ago. Second, the game we’ve all played was actually designed to be tedious and divisive, to be increasingly unfun for most of its players, and to reward blind luck, bullying and conniving.[2] Magie clearly underestimated the appeal of schadenfreude[3] and of playing the role of being one of the lucky few at the top of the pile.[4]

If Monopoly was a book: literary equivalence

To translate this into literary terms, I’d hark back to the kind of sentimental pulp novels about poor but virtuous orphans exploited by rich and powerful people but saved at the last minute by marrying one of those self-same exploiters whose hearts they have suddenly melted through their patient, noble, non-resistant and above all steadfastly apolitical suffering (and never mind all the other employees who are still being exploited, maybe with a slight raise).

These schmaltzy novels were rip-offs of the kind of trenchant social critique offered by Dickens and similar authors, recognising the power of tugging on the heartstrings but doing so simply to sell copies without offering solutions to, or motivating change in, any of the broader structural social ills that occasioned the very real suffering they depicted.[5]

Now, these trashy poor-orphan-married-into-wealth novels were immensely popular in their time (Wodehouse readers may recall him sending up the type repeatedly), but were recognised as junk even then. Literature as an artform was taken seriously enough that, despite their popularity, the obvious unoriginality and implausibility of the novels meant they were (rightly) denied serious attention. They made their money and then they faded away. (Though it is worth noting that they are immediate ancestors of the Mills & Boon school of formulaic button-pushing.)

Imagine if one of those novels had spawned a vast fortune, and the possessors of that vast fortune had dedicated it to ensuring that that particular novel was regarded as The Novel, emblematic of the entire medium. They spent fortunes promoting it, made sure that everyone had read it, and that such reading was bound up with memories of family spending time together.

This wouldn’t actually work with fiction, of course. Novel-reading is solitary, so it’s less easily associated with family rivalries or fond family time together. Moreover, our hunger for novelty – pardon the semi-pun – militates against such endless repetition of a single work. But in board games, the network effects discussed earlier push us towards known works to a greater degree than in literature, and the injection of play from the audience means that outdatedness is less immediately obvious and repetitiveness is reduced. And the fact that games are not taken as seriously as literature has meant that the obvious flaws in the game have not been as widely noticed or critiqued, until now – though among aficionados of games they have been widely known for some time.

Why it matters that Monopoly is bad

To be clear once again, the problem is not that the game exists, nor that people enjoy it – indeed, more power to them!

Rather, the problem is that it’s considered emblematic of the medium. Again, this is a game which – by design – causes fights, is tedious, plays on negative emotions, and does little to exercise the brain (when engaged with as intended by its current publishers; clearly it’s fascinating as an object of critical study). It is such a bad example of its kind that it is known to frequently deter people from the entire medium of tabletop games.

Given a limited budget for books (or music or movies…), no sane librarian would spend it on a novel that was so antagonistic and tiresome that it caused a fair number of people who read it to give up on fiction altogether.

Of course, we might buy such a novel if it was requested enough, or if it was going to be used to study the medium. But given the kind of really limited budget for books that is typically on offer for board games, would we waste it in this way instead of buying something better? I submit that we would politely explain that our priority was to help people access the good stuff, and put a little effort into helping people find that. (My tabletop games bundle is designed as a decent start.)

And I further politely submit that, until such time as our board games budgets are more than the crumbs from our programs and collections budgets, we should do the same with Monopoly.

Endnotes

[1] This paragraph is a potted summary of an excellent book on the subject, Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists. I recommend it as a fascinating, well-researched piece of the best sort of cultural history, one that goes deep into its particular subject but maintains an eye for the wider connections and import of its topic.

[2] And one can’t help but feel that Magie would take it as further proof of her views about the worst of corporate capitalism, as an act of intellectual theft covered by brute-force legal and PR shenanigans, and a co-opting of a radically critical voice to make profit.

[3] Safely contained within the magic circle of play, of course; idealists don’t always anticipate how that can transform the subject matter they’re so earnest about.

[4] To be fair, the appeal of such roleplaying would have been even greater during the Great Depression, when Monopoly became such a massive hit, than it was during the age of robber barons that came before it.

[5] Note the parallel to the co-option of Monopoly from its intended purpose.

(For some reason the embedding isn’t allowing me to bookmark the starting time, so skip to 1:20 – though the introduction is pretty interesting. And so is the bit just afterwards, where Dr Brown talks about his work with a serial killer. Or, you know what, just watch the whole thing. It’s ALL pretty interesting.)

I’ve mentioned before that mammals deprived of play die. As Brown goes on to discuss in the above video (at 11:41), one specific story of how that happens comes from experiments with rats. Rats deprived of play as pups, and a group of normal/playful control rats, were both exposed to stimuli suggesting a hungry cat was nearby. Naturally, both kinds of rats hid from the mortal threat. But where the normal rats would eventually, cautiously, poke their noses out to see if the cat was gone, the play-deprived rats never did. They literally wasted away because they refused to risk coming back out. When Brian Sutton-Smith said that the opposite of play is not seriousness or work, but depression, he had in mind the full, potentially catastrophic disorder.

Contrast that fearfulness to the husky in this video clip, who is confronted by a clear threat she is unable to avoid (note her chain). Instead she shows incredible courage and a kind of transformative engagement with the situation. She doesn’t seek to ignore, deny or escape the polar bear: she engages in what improv theatre (a fascinating form of play that you could describe as “stage play without a stageplay”) calls “yes, and”, acknowledging and accepting the other while bringing herself… to bear? into play? There are too many puns here… while asserting herself onto the situation.

Obviously risk-taking is a double-edged sword, and recklessness can be as dangerous as fearfulness. Sometimes a cat is still there. But in play, young animals – including humans – test and learn their own limits, making their risk-taking not reckless (in the sense of lacking reckoning against reality) but informed. The playful rats weren’t gung-ho, they just were prepared to act on the basis that things sometimes change for the better.

The links here to innovation are obvious, and those to freedom, but surely so are the links to mental health. Courageous acceptance-and-optimism is necessary not only in engaging with the outer world but in confronting one’s own demons and resisting the emotional pressures of a misfiring brain.

Play helps us foster that kind of realistic courage, the willingness to face up to the scary and unpleasant and the hopeful determination to do what we can to make things better, even if we’re not sure of the outcome of those efforts. And that’s something we need more of.

]]>https://philipminchin.com/2016/05/11/talking-points-reprise-play-courage-and-hope/feed/0ftffgFrance’s Inspection générale des bibliothèques issues 122-page report on games in librarieshttps://philipminchin.com/2015/05/13/frances-inspection-generale-des-bibliotheques-issues-122-page-report-on-games-in-libraries/
https://philipminchin.com/2015/05/13/frances-inspection-generale-des-bibliotheques-issues-122-page-report-on-games-in-libraries/#respondTue, 12 May 2015 23:00:13 +0000http://philipminchin.com/?p=80455Continue reading →]]>Hey folks! Sorry it’s taken a couple of months for me to get to this – I’m not a native French speaker, for starters!

Anyway, in February, the Inspection générale des bibliothèques (the General Inspectorate of Libraries, the French government body overseeing libraries) published a report to their Culture Minister titled “Game and library: for a fruitful union”. Clocking in at 122 pages, I haven’t yet read it all – my French is kinda rusty – but the final paragraph of the Synthesis (the Executive Summary) reads:

The game has a rightful place in the library, among the resources and the actions that constitute [the library], in line with the establishment’s project, in engagement with its territory and the practices of its publics. The game thus becomes an element of the library’s identity, identity the library must preserve in all its complexity and richness.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I happen to think the French know a thing or two about culture. So I’ll admit to feeling a little chirpy to be reading a report to their Culture Minister from the official body that oversees their libraries that reads like something I could have written for my Talking Points series.

I’m going to keep reading the report, as I get time, and will quite possibly post some more excerpts here. Meanwhile, if you feel as though you’d like to know more about why this is happening, I do offer training…

]]>https://philipminchin.com/2015/05/13/frances-inspection-generale-des-bibliotheques-issues-122-page-report-on-games-in-libraries/feed/0ftffgCrowdsourcing services to librarieshttps://philipminchin.com/2015/05/12/crowdsourcing-services-to-libraries/
https://philipminchin.com/2015/05/12/crowdsourcing-services-to-libraries/#respondTue, 12 May 2015 05:40:12 +0000http://philipminchin.com/?p=80336Continue reading →]]>Following on from my previous post about libraries engaging with new models for the production of culture, particularly crowdsourcing platforms, I wanted to highlight a parallel opportunity for libraries to efficiently get the support they need.

It’s a universal complaint that libraries have very poor budgets for training and advice – especially in relation to exactly the areas where training and advice are most needed, those where public demand is high but libraries’ metrics are not yet well-formed and their staff (including management) are not yet well-informed. Yes, library staff are skilled at research and self-directed study – but sometimes the most efficient way to learn is from someone who has already done all that work and can save you time.

This is especially true for the kind of training that is hardest to arrange affordably – specialised training for only a small number of staff. The time of specialist staff is inherently less flexible and more in-demand, because there are fewer people who can step in for them; and because training sessions tend to be smaller, costs are split between fewer participants and therefore higher per head.

Enter crowdsourcing.

The same basic principles that let the general public aggregate their demand – and money – in support of created works can serve libraries just as well. We just need to commit to doing so.

So what I propose is that libraries – and their umbrella bodies – start talking about formal systems that they can use to pool both funds and lists of topics on which they are seeking advice and/or training. Bodies like ALIA, the PLVN – and equivalents elsewhere – or National/State Libraries could set up a register of topics or activities of interest, and there are a couple of ways in which the aggregation of funding could be handled.

Speaking as someone who became a consultant precisely to give libraries access to this sort of specialised advice, I can affirm that this would be something I personally would be happy to support. While it’s in my financial interests to get as many different payments as possible for the same thing, that’s not my primary objective. So I am entirely happy to hear from libraries who would be interested in sharing the cost of training I run in order that I can help you find people to split the costs.

I would also be happy to help umbrella bodies develop the systems they require to support their members in this way. (And, in keeping with the spirit of this idea, to share the results with other such bodies so that they can benefit too.)

I contemplated posting it separately, but it was always part of the idea, just one I originally took out because I wanted to think about it some more. But I’ve decided I like it, so it’s back in. If you’ve already read the original version of the post, click the link above to skip straight to the new stuff. If you haven’t, just read the whole thing

Corporations who claim they speak for the creators we love are major driving forces in turning the internet into the largest mass-surveillance tool in human history.

The crux of the issue is the one-sided defense of copyright by powerful vested interests. (And, per Doctorow, the lack of countervailing powerful vested interests in the citizenry remaining free and unsurveilled.)

The one-sidedness of the policy conversation in this area is leading governments to act in ways that are inimical to freedom and the human rights of everyday citizens, through the imposition of excessive and disproportionate penalties for noncommercial copyright infringement and the enabling of a vast katascopocracy[1] to detect such infringements. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been making this argument for years, far more effectively than I could, so I’lljustlinkyou to them. (The folks at Defective by Design and Chilling Effects also have some points to make about the problems of DRM and a heavily-surveilled internet.)

But the “content” industries have one incontestable point in their favour: we do love creative works.

Not only do the folks who create them inherently deserve some prospect of reward for doing so, but if creators aren’t rewarded for making them, they will be able to make far fewer. This is the crux of the audience contract: in exchange for people taking the time and effort to create something, and potentially making themselves vulnerable and the centre of attention by sharing it, the community will ensure that there is at least a hope that they will end up no worse off – or even better off. Without some expectation of a return on creative work from the audience of that work, dedicated creation becomes much less viable, and creation has to happen in time carved out of a life supported some other way. That makes certain creative forms and professions (those requiring large budgets, long periods of dedicated work, and/or large groups of collaborators) near-impossible without the patronage of the hugely wealthy, granting them a destructively disproportionate, quasi-feudal voice in the culture.[2]

The solution (in principle)

So how do we combine easy, effectively unlimited, and unmonitored copying of creative works with rewarding creators?

We shift the focus away from the creative work, and onto the act of creation and the creator(s) themselves. Rather than just an industrial, widget-based economy where a work is rewarded based on the number of reproductions sold, we move to an artistic, networked economy where audiences can express appreciation for a specific work or for its creator with equal facility in a wide range of ways – and sharing copies of a creator’s work, rather than robbing the creator, is actually helping spread their work and their reputation.

Purchases of artefacts will continue to be one major way to do this. Artefacts may of course be hard-copy reproductions of the work, whether generic reproductions such as mass-market books, or prestigious limited editions with fancy covers etc. They may also, as webcomics creators have found, be associated artefacts that declare an affiliation to or appreciation for the work or the creator, such as T-shirts or various tchotchkes. They may be entirely unrelated; some online creators derive significant income from goods that, aside from a common creator/publisher, bear no relation whatever to the works for which the creator is best known. Regardless, whatever the nature of the artefact, commercial production and distribution of those artefacts should of course require that the creator of the work(s) be rewarded for the use of their work.

Active recommendation/sharing of the creator’s work is another – after all, an audience is a potentially valuable thing for anyone, especially a creator. The creator can also derive income from the other side of this process: using affiliate links in online marketplaces, and similar technology, to capture a fraction of any sale triggered by their recommendations is much more lucrative if those recommendations have a substantial audience. And other as-yet uninvented modes of endorsement and support are still on the way.

However, direct payment from audience to creator will become – is already becoming – another substantial avenue of support for creators. The tools to support aggregation of mass support both for specific projects and directly for creators themselves – crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Pozible, Flattr, and Patreon – are already in place and growing in popularity. (Note that these are not inherently hostile to existing production and distribution models – numerous successful crowdfunding beneficiaries have gone on to use existing channels for publishing completed works to a wider audience.)

By enabling popular/mass patronage to compete with that of a single wealthy entity, platforms like these substantially, though not entirely, mitigate the feudal tendencies alluded to above of historical models of patronage. In some respects they even go further towards democratizing culture, enabling niche audiences and creators to find each other who otherwise might be missed by publishing bureaucracies focusing on larger returns from larger market segments. After all, the additional costs imposed by such corporate apparatus means that an income which can viably sustain a creator is often not sufficient to sustain them plus the industry that supposedly supports them – making the bureaucracies that supposedly exist to help creators find sustainable livings, even if entirely honest and efficient, sometimes a barrier to that same sustainability.

Certainly in the games industry, the use of these services by independent creators and critics to fund work that otherwise would have gone unfunded has had a huge impact. Whether the colossal success of the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter in 2012 resulting in games propelling that service into the mainstream and becoming its #1 category ($300m of its $1.5b to date), or the breakout success of Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency Kickstarter revealing the scope of both the audience for basic feminist critique of popular culture and the vitriol of the anti-feminist backlash, it is fair to say that crowdfunding has been central to the last few years of games culture. (Which is, of course, a large and growing part of mainstream culture.) But while games creators have been particularly quick to jump on the opportunities offered by these new models (gamers being trained to spot opportunity and advantage, and highly sensitive to network effects), no medium is ignoring them – or can afford to.

The library, however – the place that above all others has been about enabling the public’s right to access to culture and information in a systemic, sustainable way; that above all others is about connecting the public with what they love regardless of commercial considerations – has been sitting this transformation out.

I believe that this is a mistake: we have a key role to play in this. Further, I believe that if libraries take a more active interest in helping creators and their audiences find each other efficiently and make a living, the supposedly irreconcilable tensions between free (meaning unsurveilled as well as unrestricted) sharing of culture and the needs of creators start to look a lot less intractable. Finally, I believe that remaining blind to the tremendous ferment of creativity enabled by these new funding and publication channels is a great way to make ourselves irrelevant. If we are increasingly seen as supplying a representative sample only of corporate-approved materials rather than of the full range of contemporary culture, we both abandon our popular mandate and play into the idea that all we do is compete with retailers of commercial creative works.

Below are just a few suggestions for how we might make that shift. But before I close this theoretical section, let me address one key argument against free culture: the economic-rationalist view that once someone has something for free they will never pay for it. To me, this says more about the mean-mindedness of the theorists than it does about reality. The actual facts of piracy contradict this, with shows and movies that have been shared unauthorised still being heavily watched and purchased, and even some producers of such projects (the hugely successful Game of Thrones comes to mind) acknowledging the role that “piracy” (actually peer-to-peer sharing rather than industrial-scale commercial reproduction) has played in making their shows more popular and more successful. But more importantly, it also ignores the tremendous willingness people have to invest time, energy and money into supporting and celebrating the things they love. Fan culture, which has been on the rise alongside peer-to-peer sharing and, not coincidentally, has always been one of the major places such unauthorised copying occurs, is merely the most overt example. The correlation between library usage and book purchasing is another, less obvious demonstration of the fact that free access to culture – far from reducing interest and investment in it – only increases the time, energy and money people are willing to spend on the things they appreciate.

Some solutions (in practice)

Let me note at the outset that, while some of these suggestions may result in substantial changes to library practice and relationships, I don’t consider any of them to be particularly significant changes to the basic job of a library. My point is that for libraries to continue doing what they’ve always done – sampling and making available a wide variety of content to suit their particular patrons’ interests – they need to start considering these sorts of possibilities, because the old models for publishing and distributing creative works are being forced to make room for new ones.

Expanding the pool of publishing/distribution channels from which we buy

For various reasons, libraries have outsourced more and more of their collections and processing to companies who use economies of scale to lower per-unit costs.

Aside from any other effects of this trend, it locks libraries into materials that are available to be distributed (and processed) at those kinds of scales. And it does this precisely at the historical moment when original voices are less likely to make it through those filters (owing to the consolidation and resulting homogenisation of editorial voice into publishing megacorporations), and more likely to publish through the newer channels we are neglecting.

As these more direct creator-audience publishing models become more prevalent, there will be less reason for creators to have industrial-scale volumes of stock created and hanging around to be sold. Such creators will already know the size of their audience, and in some cases will have printed directly for their previously-measured demand. (For instance, a Kickstarted project might print only the number of copies of a work needed to fulfil the project’s obligations, plus a small percentage of spares in case of damage, shipping error, and so on.)

For this reason, libraries that rely on traditional print-then-sell publishers may miss out entirely on opportunities to acquire particular works which may be hugely influential. While such works are likely to find a reprint, past experience has shown that this can take some time, during which period the library is failing to supply the work to its patrons. And again, this assumes that the work finds a home with existing publishers – which many critical viewpoints may not.

Therefore, libraries need to consider allocating some budget to buying works from new crowdfunding platforms, and to as-yet-unknown publishing models, not just the 20th-century publishing models we’re used to.

Naturally, some of this purchasing will need to be done at patron request – just like regular collections. In fact, I’d suggest that in the interests of discovering the widest possible range of such works, you might want to actively cultivate patron suggestions in this area. The trend towards targeted promotion includes creators looking for their audience; you are unlikely to see interesting new authors advertising in the mainstream press or publishing trade journals.

In this connection, it’s worth noting that academic libraries are moving towards models where their catalogues will find items to which the library does not yet have lending rights, and acquiring those rights in response to demand from the academic populace they serve. Of course, this is partly a response to the outrageous prices and conditions being imposed by academic publishers, who are making sharing of research (research that is of course founded upon the intellectual commons) harder and more expensive at precisely the historical moment when doing so is actually getting easier and cheaper. Even so, the models exist, and may well have lessons for how to find the best purchases for a given library’s collection.

Engaging better with free content – including rewarding creators who contribute to the library’s collections and resources after the fact

As discussed above, part of the present shift in cultural production is moving away from the make-a-widget-sell-a-widget industrial model. If creators choose to make their content available in that way, we should by all means continue to use existing systems to pay for their work. But as more and more creators explore open culture publishing models, and rely on support from those who use their creations, I believe that libraries need to start considering their relationship to such creators and their work.

I’m only too well aware that library budgets are often a pittance compared to demonstrable need, and that it might be hard to justify paying for “free” resources. I’m also well aware that simply by having an item in the library’s collection, we are helping its creator find their audience – and therefore, in crude commercial terms, their market.

However, I believe that libraries need to not only take seriously the material that’s published free online and do more to explore it for our patrons, but to acknowledge the debt we have to the free online resources we use.

And, as a logical and moral extension of that point, to consider chipping in financially and practically accordingly – both as a matter of principle, and as a matter of modelling the appropriate relationship to creative and other original work to our patrons.

This is a complex and nuanced discussion – for instance, by having the library contribute to the costs of a creator, does that make our patrons feel they are absolved from doing likewise, causing them to donate less? It probably deserves a post of its own, really. But in the age of Creative Commons, copyleft, and the Free Culture movement, too few libraries are even considering these questions.

[But for the sake of clarity: yes, this does mean I am saying that libraries should consider both donating to Wikipedia and allocating some staff time to be made available to edit it. (Aside from any other considerations, this might go a long way to redressing the gender imbalance among Wikipedia editors.)]

One fact I feel needs to be central to these considerations is that as an institution with a considerable – though usually inadequate – budget, libraries are often better off than either individual creators or the project teams to which they are donating their time and effort. While I fully understand and even applaud libraries wanting to conserve budgets, the fact remains that however resource-poor we are, chances are that creators of free resources are also not well off – and unlike libraries, they actually feel hunger. It would once have gone without saying that we need to be willing to contribute to the costs of resources we include. This applies equally to resources for which we pay via non-conventional means as to those purchased under long-established models. To do otherwise is to discriminate against creators who are attempting to make it easier to share their work – in other words, people who share our values.

I’m not proposing carte blanche for anyone who publishes free stuff online. Given that these resources are free, it is not unreasonable to add them to the collection and see how they fare. However, I submit that we must be willing to consider paying creators at the point we are certain we want their work in the collection, whether that decision comes before they are added or after assessing our patrons’ response to the works.

I’m fully conscious that – budgets being directly affected by this idea – there are some key stakeholders who will resist it: organisational managers who will ask some pretty hard questions about why libraries should pay for something they already got for free. Those are valid, but answerable, questions – we should be able to demonstrate the value of the items to the collection, and therefore the need to sustain and reward creators. And answering them properly will also incidentally reduce the gameability of such systems (whereby library staff might corruptly dispose of library funds to the benefit of themselves or those close to them).

But let’s be clear: this will also inevitably involve a certain amount of managing up. We shouldn’t shy from that. Organisational managers are excellent at managing generic “resources”, but librarians are the experts in the collection and sharing of culture. It is right that managers ask questions about how resources are expended, but they are not qualified to offer leadership in making those decisions. Again, for library folks not to be in the forefront of engaging with a cultural shift of this magnitude is to voluntarily edge ourselves and our beloved libraries towards redundancy.

Libraries cultivating support for creators as a moral and practical imperative if people like content

Libraries could do more to get people supporting the creators they love, and even those they don’t love, but benefit from, or think are interesting or important. This needn’t be restricted to newer crowdfunding-type channels; buying a book or a DVD is just as much an option for supporting creators as pledging to their next project (or a past one). That said, it is worth us helping our communities explore what share of the money spent on each option actually ends up with the people who created the work – and how clearly that support sends the signal people want it to send.

Most people, including most creators, certainly make the common-sense assumption that libraries already foster this kind of active appreciation and support of culture to a considerable degree. (And they are right to do so: both logic and evidence very much point this way!)

But we could do more both to celebrate what we already do and to find new ways to advance the principle of supporting creativity. (It helps that both these things would also give us further leverage in negotiations with recalcitrant publishers over price and terms of newer forms of published works, e.g. ebooks.)

For instance, we could (and should) act in an educational capacity – telling the story of what these new funding models enable. Not everyone will be interested, but just as we help people explore the world of books and then translate their tastes into purchases at the bookshop, there are genuine opportunities for us to support our communities in exploring these new channels – both as audiences engaging with original work, and as potential creators themselves.

We could also spell out the connection made at the start of this paper, between the need to protect privacy and the need to provide an alternative to the widget-sales model of cultural economics.

We could also do more to foster yet other ways for creators to engage their audiences, and for audiences to enable their creators to make a living, as some of the following suggestions outline. To this point I have largely focused on ways libraries can work in with existing or emerging systems that are independent of them. In the suggestions that follow, I will begin exploring ways in which our unique attributes and position enable us to offer opportunities unavailable elsewhere.

Libraries cultivating their own audience’s creative aspirations as a way to instil respect for other creators

As I’ve discussed previously, libraries are increasingly moving towards becoming libraries of their community as well as for their community, with a growing focus on supporting creativity among their patrons rather than simply gathering the best of what’s happening elsewhere.

There has always been an element of seeking to support local creators in libraries’ work; at the very least we are inclined to purchase their work, if not actively promote it to their community. After all, a work is more likely to be of interest to patrons if they have met its creator, and more likely to be relevant given the greater odds of a similar background.

Likewise, we have sought to foster new creators through programs like writers’ workshops, especially for young people. Similarly, as the internet has grown to greater social and economic prominence in people’s lives, we have sought to help our patrons learn how to navigate it.

I believe that we can fruitfully combine these two things and help new creators learn to navigate these systems to find support. Having done so, we can help our communities discover their local creators just as those creators are seeking their audience. And we can help those local creators to build on that audience and leverage it into wider success, and to network and support each other in making their way out to the wider world.

How does this translate into supporting creators? One necessary corollary of helping people create is that patrons who have attempted their own creative work, and to a lesser extent those who aspire to do so, will better appreciate the work involved, and the need for creators to have a sufficient income to continue to create. This is not entirely dissimilar to simply respecting those who make things we like, as in the previous point, but the respect is likely to be more nuanced and to include those who make things we don’t like but who make them exceptionally well.

Again, rather than leaving this as an implicit point of learning, libraries could make an effort to explicitly leverage these teachable moments to make this point. (As always, heavy-handedness can backfire, but the basic point is incontestible.)

Libraries as channels to contact creators/agents if their patrons are interested in work

If the library is to become a vector for the audience-creator relationship, clearly our greatest strength is on the audience side of that equation; it’s our relationship to creators that we will need to develop.

One possibility here might be to develop tools and protocols that enable our circulation and activity data – thoroughly anonymised, of course! – to become a resource for creators and their representatives.

One such option might be a standardised, automated interface for flagging that the library staff, on behalf of their patrons, are interested in the creator’s work, along with some capacity to suggest particular activities that might be of most interest, or to outline activities that are happening anyway that might offer opportunities for the creator to piggyback their own event onto. For instance, a library might report that their members would love a presentation from a particular creator, or might report that a book club are holding a cosplay event themed around a creator’s work.

There would be no expectation of a response – that would need to be up to the creator, who would have the information to dip into as their own interests suggest – but creators would have a potential insight into where their work was being appreciated… and where they might profitably be able to visit and engage their audience in whatever further ways they desire.

The obvious use of this is in finding hotspots for things like book tours, but creators who want to run things like workshops, or to engage with audiences in other ways (perhaps to gain audience input into new, more collaborative creative forms), could also use information from such an interface to target those efforts as well. In the book club cosplay event example above, the creator might get in touch with the library and offer to judge, plus hold a signing or a Q&A about the characters.

Such engagement need not take place within the library, though it is a logical venue for such things as creator talks, creative workshops, and so on. Local retailers (bookshops, music shops, etc) or other businesses might come on board to help organise, promote, and host the event. The creator might see sufficient demand in a region that they might hire out a larger public venue. The event might be a specialised activity requiring particular tech, furniture and/or spatial configurations, such as LAN gaming, a theatrical production, or an artistic installation.

In any case, the library could become both a channel for the creator to notice that demand exists, and a potential partner in letting the audience know about it. And it would provide a level of granularity in the detail as to where demand exists that is currently not possible – or at least not without invasive data mining. (I hope no library worker needs an explanation as to why supporting alternatives to mass snooping on the public is a good thing!)

Another (and related) option would be to have the library be the place where people learn how to reach out to the creators whose works they admire. A workshop on writing to creators and other public figures, where attendees can nominate who they want to contact, and which covers basic etiquette, reasonable expectations, understanding of the demands on public figures’ time, and maybe a little research into the specific creators’ preferred channels of communication and/or modes of relating to their audience, could potentially be a relatively easy way for individual libraries to start moving into this space. (I’m also quite sure it would be a remarkably popular program! Contact me if you’re interested in pursuing this further.)

Admittedly, the existence of celebrity stalkers means this could be somewhat fraught! But as with most situations, the conspicuously unbalanced individuals who make trouble for everyone are a tiny minority. In fact, by planting the seeds of reason at the beginning of someone’s engagement, libraries could do a great deal to avert the obsessive spirals such people fall into.

Enabling creators to routinely see stats on loans/access to their works through libraries

The basic idea here is that thoroughly anonymized loan stats are fed into a centralized system and then made available to creators (or their deputized agents), so they can see a global heat map of the public’s engagement with their works in libraries.

Not only does this potentially feed into marketing for their next creative work, it also allows them to plan book tours, and even potentially help fund a holiday by picking up a little public speaking work in the destination country. And for creators who are more interested in direct relationships with their audience, this sort of information could be invaluable.

To be genuinely useful, this would need to distinguish number of loans and number of borrowers so that creators can tell when a library has a single obsessive re-reader or when they have a genuinely wide audience there.

Given that libraries in many countries already track some such usage statistics as part of public lending right schemes, and therefore some such central reporting already takes place through national libraries, in some ways this is not that much of a stretch from current systems – especially if the trend towards centralising and amalgamating library services continues, and given that library loan records are all electronic anyway.

In other respects I can see it being a political nightmare, on the one hand used by creators (and the megacorporations who benefit disproportionately from managing their rights) to lobby for higher lending payments or more restrictions on libraries, and on the other hand pushing for greater violations of privacy in the form of more detailed access to more-poorly-anonymized lending information. Certainly libraries would need to value this information appropriately as the tremendous resource it is, rather than simply giving such information away without a substantial tradeoff.

Just as crucially, libraries would need to recognise that such data is held in trust from the public, both as individuals and collectively. It is not an asset libraries own and are free to dispose of in their own interests, without regard to the interests of those from whom it is derived.

Lastly, this need not be limited to loans or other access data. As above, it could include information about activities (including those outlined below) taking place in the library relevant to a particular creator. Given that we also report on this sort of thing already to some degree, once again it’s just a case of making sure that the information is sufficiently detailed (specifically, that we are reporting on the subject of activities, rather than just aggregating headcounts under general headings like “story times” etc) and goes where it can be used.

Embedding portals to creators in library catalogues/metadata

[For those who read the post early and are just wanting to find the new stuff, this is the section that was added after publication.]

Given that we already have independent authority records for creators, and even have value-added subscription services such as Syndetics and OCLC providing expanded content for our records, to simply add a link from a work or a creator’s authority record to a URL they nominate seems pretty simple. All we need is some sort of central authority to track authors’ official “home pages” – something that could largely be automated and built into library deposit or public lending right schemes – and we’re already helping people connect with creators.

But this is only the least of the possibilities. We might for instance allow similar creator-controlled fields within bibliographic records, to take people to the official URL for a particular creative work, rather than just a standard link for the creator. The tools to manage this would be slightly more complex technically, and more work to manage, but would still be well within the realms of possibility.

Taking this even further, I can imagine a third-party service that provides (moderated!) embedded content to library catalogues directly from creators. As an example, when the publication date of the next installment of a beloved series is revealed, one of the channels for that announcement might be the catalogue pages of the previous installments. Obviously this sort of thing would need moderation – nobody should have unrestricted anytime access to the pages of the library catalogue – but a trusted third party working within agreed frameworks and standards could very easily make something like this a valuable tool for audiences, libraries, and creators.

We could even allow creators to post links to purchase copies of their work in ways that the creator feels best supports them. This might be referral links to online stores like Amazon, or it might be a service that lists local booksellers that stock particular works, or it might be a print-on-demand service. Simply putting this decision in the hands of creators would give them additional leverage in the creative economy – leverage that at present is very much with publishers and distributors – without the library being seen to misuse its position to favour one particular local (or other) business.

And naturally such things need not be limited to widget purchases. We might also – especially for works that we have included in the collection unpaid – allow crowdfunding links, such as those from services like Flattr or Patreon. These might be general “fund the creator” links, or they might be more specific “reward this particular work” links. Either way people who have found the work worthwhile can support the creator – and everyone is completely clear that the sharing of the work was beneficial to the creator.

In the interests of privacy, we might even consider becoming an anonymous channel for such support. One downside of direct patronage for some members of the public will be that such systems involve putting their support or appreciation for particular ideas or works on the record in ways that are not visible or accountable to them. Just as we are channels for anonymous reading, we could become channels for anonymous patronage. It would be a politically fraught process, with only the imperfect anonymity our readers enjoy; and it would be tremendously open to corruption (anonymity and money are never a good combination!), but it’s certainly a conceivable role for libraries to play.

Libraries as places to build community – and for communities to build themselves

We like to talk about libraries as the new village square, but it’s remarkable to me how little we do to enable public-driven usage of the space. I understand why: there are custodial obligations to our collections, spaces, and patrons that rule out or at least complicate a number of public activities. But in a true village square, activity is not predominantly programmed by public employees but often emerges organically from the interests of the people in the space at any given time.

Given those custodial obligations, which are real and too important to abandon, we can’t aspire to that level of unsupervised, unstructured public usage. But as I’ve touched on earlier in my two-way libraries paper, we could be doing a lot more to provide a degree of structure and mutual accountability that would allow more of this self-directed usage.

One such usage could be to encourage people to think of the library as a safe neutral (and somewhat anonymous) venue for shared cultural interests. We do this somewhat with book clubs, but rather than organising them ourselves and fixing the topic and activity, we could quite easily create tools based on pledgebanking systems that would allow the public to propose their own (suitably moderated) shared uses for our public meeting spaces and discover if there were interest for their ideas.

I think it’s quite likely that some such uses would include fan clubs for the various media we enable people to access – and this would be very much to the benefit of creators, especially in combination with the above reporting.

It is not a coincidence that the media that most require this sort of co-ordinated physical copresence, in this case to experience it at all not only to share appreciation, are the various forms of interpersonal play, especially social and tabletop games.

Libraries to host networked meeting/lecture spaces to connect communities all over the world

Technologies to connect multiple groups in different locations into a single larger group have largely been the domain of corporate meetings. But they do already exist, and could provide some remarkable opportunities for libraries to connect their communities not only indirectly through the shared world of learning and culture that we enable our patrons to access, but by directly allowing them to share experiences.

This could – and should – include homegrown experiences such as local history events, talks by local creators, and so on. (“Sister City” arrangements could particularly benefit and be strengthened.) There is a lot to be said for horizontal grassroots sharing of this sort, though that’s another post.[3]

But it could also allow numerous libraries with smaller budgets to pool funds to pay for creator talks by famous creators, or other more-expensive-but-relatively-simple events, that would then be shared live throughout all contributing libraries. (In my view, any library worth its salt would talk to the creator about then posting such talks on the internet under some sort of free culture license, but having the chance to be in the live audience – and potentially interact with the public figures in question – would be the preserve of the participants in the actual libraries at the time.)

It would even make such events cheaper, since travel costs would be reduced to the distance to the nearest participating library – or the nearest other facilities capable of streaming such events.

And of course, combined with the above patron-driven approach to the use of spaces and facilities, new uses for this sort of capacity would be quick to emerge.

Finally, I fully realise that libraries have plenty of lobbying to do for our own budgets. But if we’re going to be helping audiences and creators engage more anyway, we’re going to be de facto supporting one common cause that is likely to draw broad support from the creative sectors: improving funding for the creative sectors.

While limited public funds mean that ultimately there is a degree of rivalry or tension between funding creation and funding libraries, both are clearly essential, and proponents of both should be vigorously supporting each other. And it would certainly cement the library as a key ally to the creator.

This is a point worth stressing. The reason that the corporations of the “content industry” have so successfully imposed their clearly disproportionate demands on the internet is because they have portrayed themselves as the champions of the creators who make the cultural and intellectual works that we love and need. And, to be fair, they have enabled some truly astonishing work.

But publishing corporations are not the only ally to creators. (Indeed, in some cases, the relationship has not been an alliance but rather profoundly exploitative.) And the corporations (and the lobbying groups that represent them) have clearly abandoned any respect for the interests – let alone the rights – of the public, except insofar as those rights are the right to purchase their product.

As the institution that has always been about the public freely engaging with culture, the library can and should step up. We are here for our patrons, and because our patrons (and we) love culture, we are here for the people who create it as well. Perhaps we can even help publishers let go of the obsessive need to monitor and monetise every possible engagement with a creative work, and go back to their core job: finding and supporting original, amazing creators. There are wider social forces at work here, of course, but most publishers are already keenly aware of how despotic and bureaucratic they look at times (and how much money is wasted on their attempts to assert oligopolistic control over the Internet). They need only a sense that there is another way to make a living, that they are not abandoning their responsibilities to shareholders and creators, and it suddenly makes sense to simply walk away from the worst excesses of the widget-selling model of culture.

But they won’t do this without creators taking a lead, and creators too need to know that they can find a living elsewhere. That sense of tension, of competition for limited funds, evaporates when you look at the bigger picture of what the point of libraries and of creating original works actually is. This is why it’s important for libraries to advocate for funding not only for themselves and the audiences they serve, but for the creators they serve as well.

In this regard, it doesn’t hurt that – if the suggestions above and in that two-way library piece linked earlier gain traction – libraries will be directly supporting creation to a greater degree, such that funding one is funding the other!

Conclusion

We in the library business are deeply committed to creators, and always have been. Our whole reason for being is to help the communities we serve find the created works (whether artistic or referential) that most meet their requirements – a function that, while public-facing, also serves creators. Far more than a mere recommendation engine or discovery interface, we enable our patrons to explore and develop their own tastes rather than merely throwing back at them endless iterations on themes they already like. In doing so, we serve creators of both excellence and originality – and most of all those creators who offer both at once. In other words, we both broaden and deepen the market for culture.

But because we are public-facing, we are also custodians of the bigger picture of culture: that created works exist to serve a greater good. That’s the reason that copyright and similar elaborate legal mechanisms have been created and operate at such vast expense to the public – original work is important enough that we recognise the imperative to reward it.

However, creative/original thinking isn’t the only public good, and material incentives aren’t the only way to encourage it.[4] The right to access culture and information unmonitored, and the right to freedom of expression, are both central pillars of the kind of intellectual freedom fosters genuinely original thinking. And both are threatened by measures actively proposed by the corporate industrial interests supposedly speaking on behalf of creators.

Privacy is under assault by corporate forces that seek to prevent unauthorised copying by spying on everyone to make sure that only authorised – which is to say, remunerated – consumption of culture occurs. (To be fair, they are strongly supported in this by others who seek to spy on us for other reasons.) It is not possible technically to prevent copying the “wrong” data, but it is possible to combine the threat of ridiculously disproportionate penalties (tens of thousands of dollars and a criminal record for watching a TV episode without paying?) with highly visible, seemingly state-endorsed (and increasingly state-run) surveillance schemes to scare people into compliance. The fact that these systems can be – and are – abused to breach privacy is bad both for humanity generally and for creators specifically. Without privacy, creators are discouraged from exploring experimental, challenging, and/or personal works; these render creators vulnerable in different ways, but the hope of privacy can mitigate some of that disincentive. And of course in the bigger picture, lack of privacy fosters a climate of self-censorship and self-moderation which puts a system-wide brake on effective peaceful dissent against those in charge of these systems.

Freedom of expression is, of course, inherently inhibited by copyright laws around use of fictional characters and settings – that’s more or less its point, to prevent people other than the creator of a work from making free with it! And that’s fine – I’ll be the first to admit the undeniable benefits, both economic and intellectual, to allowing the originator of an idea or work to maintain a voice and a financial stake in how it is published, and further developed and explored. But the system we have in place now stifles genuinely original reworkings of past culture under mountains of licensing and permissions red tape (making the use of, for instance, music samples prohibitive to most people not already signed up to one of the labels with the legal departments who run the show).

It makes it impossible for scholars and archivists to preserve our legacy, by criminalising digital preservation of works without clear permission from a creator who may be untraceable – or entirely unknown. (And even if you throw principle aside and argue that a work being abandoned in this way makes it a safe bet that you can get away with unauthorised copying, there are people who would consider it just as safe a bet that they can falsely claim to own the copyright and sue.) I’ve read a number of statistics about the percentage of works from the early days of the current copyright period – which is to say, the earlier part of the 20th Century – being lost to posterity because of this. They vary, but all are shockingly high.

And it has created a remarkable new tool for censorship: simply allege copyright infringement through an automated online tool and you can get even private companies to take down material they host, pending a counter-complaint by the original poster. This has already begun to be used as a tool for removing – even if only temporarily – material that is unwelcome to some unaccountable soul at some particular moment. Governments and corporations have attempted to claim copyright in the material their critics are using to criticise them. Antagonists in various culture wars have targeted each other with false copyright claims. Far from encouraging reasoned discourse or promoting the development of cultural works, copyright has become a tool to suppress unwanted views.

Controlling the reproduction of created works in these ways is only justified if this is our mechanism for rewarding creators. If we can achieve that goal of offering incentives to creators to create in some other way, what is now seen as theft (enabling others to access a creator’s work) becomes a supportive act, an act of endorsement – which is how many people actually experience the act of sharing the works they love.

By reaffirming our commitment to supporting creators (and taking the lead in exploring new ways to do so), libraries can help break the industrial-age connection between reproduction and remuneration, helping creators to continue to prosper from their work without having to endorse – and divert ridiculous amounts of resources into – these oppressive, wasteful, and anti-creative systems.

And of course, it frees up the infosphere for us and our patrons too.

— Footnotes ——-

[1] ‘Rule by spies’. Technically, there is no effective way to encrypt something that ultimately has to be human-readable. So the only way to prevent unauthorised copying of content is to scare people into not doing it – and that can only happen if they have a reasonable expectation of their private activity being watched and recorded while online, or even by their own personal property.

[2] One could quite plausibly argue that this is already somewhat the case (*cough*Murdoch*cough*Walden Media*cough*), but at least under the current system there is some mechanism for finding support from a mass audience – even if that support is typically funnelled through (and heavily taxed by) a large number of institutional middlemen who contribute nothing to the actual creative work.

[3] Briefly: by encouraging people to pay attention not to the centralised culture industry with its necessarily skewed perceptions and priorities but to other everyday folks, we get a counterbalance for the mass-produced monoculture that distorts our sense of ourselves and our place in the world… though of course until EVERYONE has access to the networks this would create, distortions will still be built into the system.

[4] In fact I would argue that there is an inherent human drive to create, one which (history shows) finds expression regardless of such incentives. Further, the massive external incentives we’ve created for the creation of culture have – as external incentives typically do – distorted the activity they’re supposedly incentivising. Rather than becoming a tool to remove daily survival pressures and free people to express the burning truth or beauty inside them, it’s become a prize to be won by creating experiences that compel attention – regardless of whether it’s worth creating for its own sake, or whether that experience (or the compulsion) is healthy. Of course, it has also enabled a great deal of extraordinary work, and even more research into why people like what they like – I’m not saying it’s all bad. Just something to consider.

]]>https://philipminchin.com/2015/03/25/libraries-and-the-future-of-the-audience-contract/feed/1ftffgGames and real life: economics editionhttps://philipminchin.com/2015/01/30/games-and-real-life-economics-edition/
https://philipminchin.com/2015/01/30/games-and-real-life-economics-edition/#respondFri, 30 Jan 2015 03:12:06 +0000http://philipminchin.com/?p=19088Continue reading →]]>I’ve spoken elsewhere about how games companies are now not only creating virtual economies but are hiring actual economists to help manage them. Valve, one of the first to do this, has just had economist-in-residence Yaris Vafoukaris headhunted – to serve as finance minister of Greece.

Let’s be clear – Vafoukaris already had solid credentials, which is why he got the Valve gig. It’s also true that Greece is a small country and that Syriza’s left-wing politics make their economic ideas unconventional. But it’s also clearly true that his time working in the virtual economies of Valve’s games and Steam client, and their conversion to and from real-world economics (which some would say are themselves increasingly virtualised), hasn’t been seen as hurting his ability to manage one of the more troubled economies in the Eurozone.